Page 414 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 27 June 1989
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originally were sold, and now the Rally understands that the other stage has been sold. The Rally does not have details and does qualify its comments in that respect, but the sale price of around $3,000 per block reflects the need for the City Administration to look very carefully at seeing whether we can offer joint venturism and joint participation in developments in the ACT to ensure that housing on-site costs are kept as low as possible. The supply allocation, which should lead to an appropriation with proper explanations, will, the Rally hopes, recognise that housing will be a major initiative, the major necessary program of this Government.
In particular, an appropriation has to be made at an early date, in the Rally's judgment, to ensure that there is a widescale refinancing of many of the private owners who are in mortgage difficulty on their first purchase. There has always been a Housing Trust refinancing of persons who come within certain guidelines who are in financial difficulty, often on high interest rates that they cannot sustain.
We cannot have a flood of these people moving out of the mortgage belt into public housing. We should keep them in the homes they originally purchased, and we need to look at refinancing programs out of the Housing Trust budget. That needs to be used very early to allay the very great fears and the distress that you will see on the faces of those people, particularly the people who are going to these Interest Rate Revolt meetings.
It is of great concern to the Rally that there has not yet been a proper response by this Government to those gatherings. The call for Jack Lang's phoenix will only result in further problems in this Territory, unless the Chief Minister provides an early initiative in the way of refinancing for those people who are in difficulties at the moment.
Mr Speaker, the Rally's final comment in relation to the appropriations for Territory planning and for the Legislative Assembly is that we await the outcome of the full consultative processes which the Chief Minister has promised us. We are waiting to see far more detail given to the members of the Assembly, and we would hope that in contentious areas the Public Accounts Committee, the chairman of which is Mr Kaine, will look very carefully and professionally at the minutiae of the appropriation and expenditure aspects which will come downstream for further debate in this Assembly.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (3.35): I was most interested in the Residents Rally's exposition of all of its policies over the last 15 minutes, but I had to wonder just what relativity they had to the document that is before us, which is specifically the Supply Bill. Discussions of the nature that Mr Collaery was alluding to and leading up to will be appropriate when we get to the budget, and that is another matter altogether. I
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